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A view from the exhibition as Iran exhibits its missiles, satellite-carrying rockets and air defence systems, including the missiles and drones used in the Israeli attack, at the Aviation and Space Park Permanent Exhibition Centre of the Revolutionary Guards Army in capital Tehran, Iran on November 12, 2025. [Fatemeh Bahrami – Anadolu Agency]
Ali Shamkhani, a senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Monday on X that “Iran’s missile and defensive capabilities are neither containable nor in need of permission,” according to the German Press Agency (DPA).
Shamkhani was quoted by DPA as saying: “Any aggression towards Iran would be met with an “immediate harsh response” beyond the imagination of its planners.”
His remarks came in response to a warning from US President Donald Trump to Iran on Monday over rebuilding its nuclear programme. Trump made the comments while hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his Florida residence for extensive talks.
Speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said: “I’ve been reading that they’re building up weapons and other things, and if they are, we will have to hit them. But we hope it does not happen.”
He added that “the United States could support another major strike on Iran were it to resume rebuilding its ballistic missile or nuclear weapons programmes.”
Trump’s warning followed his claim that Iran’s nuclear capabilities had been “completely and entirely destroyed” by US strikes on key nuclear enrichment sites in June.
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Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Demonstrators face US Marines, National Guard members, and Department of Homeland Security officers in front of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, California on July 4, 2025. (Photo by Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images)
Accusing “a president desperate to be king” of using troops “as political pawns,” California’s attorney general noted the announcement followed “a stinging rebuke by the Supreme Court.”
After a series of losses in court, President Donald Trump ended 2025 with an announcement that he is pulling the plug on legally contested National Guard deployments in three major US cities—but he also pledged that troops will return in the new year.
Trump initially sent thousands of California National Guard members to Los Angeles in June amid protests against his violent immigration operations. The remaining troops left the city earlier this month in response to a pair of orders from a district judge and the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
The president also tried to deploy National Guard members to the streets of two other Democrat-led cities—Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois—but those moves were blocked by lawsuits, including one that produced a US Supreme Courtdecision last week.
Throughout the president’s push to deploy troops to these and other cities, he has circulated lies about crime rates. He did so again in the Wednesday announcement on his Truth Social platform, writing, “We are removing the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, despite the fact that CRIME has been greatly reduced by having these great Patriots in those cities, and ONLY by that fact.”
“Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago were GONE if it weren’t for the Federal Government stepping in,” Trump claimed. “We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again – Only a question of time! It is hard to believe that these Democrat Mayors and Governors, all of whom are greatly incompetent, would want us to leave, especially considering the great progress that has been made???”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat expected to run for president in 2028, said on social media Wednesday that it is “about time Donald Trump admitted defeat. We’ve said it from day one: The federal takeover of California’s National Guard is illegal.”
Newsom and the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, challenged the LA deployment. In that case, the US Department of Justice on Tuesday filed a brief with the 9th Circuit withdrawing its motion to keep the California troops under federal control.
“For six months, CA National Guard troops have been used as political pawns by a president desperate to be king,” Bonta said Wednesday. “Now, in the face of a stinging rebuke by the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is backing away from its effort to federalize and deploy CA National Guard troops.”
Although that Supreme Court decision was not directly about California, the justices’ rejection of the Trump administration’s request to strike down a temporary restraining order that barred the Illinois deployment was expected to inform other cases.
Trump federalized Illinois and Texas national guard troops to patrol in Chicago, but Illinois quickly sued and won a court ruling keeping them out of the city. The troops did training exercises instead. Today, Trump claims that the guard "greatly reduced" crime in Chicago. Did they do it remotely?
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another Democrat who may run for the Oval Office in the next cycle, also pointed to the recent ruling in his response to the president on Wednesday: “Donald Trump’s lying again. He lost in court when Illinois stood up against his attempt to militarize American cities with the National Guard. Now Trump is forced to stand down.”
“Illinois and Chicago have reduced crime with smart investments in police and community violence reduction programs,” he continued. “Meanwhile, Trump cut federal support for both. No matter how many lies he tells, we will keep standing up for truth and against his abuse of power.”
Ahead of Trump’s announcement, the New Republic‘s Greg Sargent said that the president and his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, “are actually failing in crucial ways. Deportations are lagging behind their goals, courts are mostly functioning, and their fascist, ethnonationalist cruelties have unleashed a countermobilization of unexpected scope and power.”
After the new Truth Social post, Sargent added: “Trump just announced that he’s pulling the National Guard out of Chicago, LA, and Portland while pretending he won some kind of big victory. Here’s the reality: Their authoritarian designs have faced massive civil and popular resistance.”
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
President Donald Trump takes questions at his Mar-a-Lago estate on December 22, 2025 in Palm Beach, Florida. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
The bill vetoed by Trump would have provided funds to finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit, a 130-mile pipeline designed to deliver clean, filtered water to 50,000 residents in the eastern part of the state.
President Donald Trump issued the first veto of his second term this week when he rejected a bill with bipartisan support aimed at ensuring access to clean drinking water in rural Colorado.
As reported by Colorado Public Radio on Tuesday, the bill in question would have provided funds to finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit, a 130-mile pipeline designed to deliver clean, filtered water to 50,000 residents in the eastern part of the state.
In a statement announcing his video [veto?] of the bill, Trump cited concerns about the size of the US deficit, even though the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that finishing the conduit will cost less than $500,000.
“My administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding expensive and unreliable policies,” said Trump, whose signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, is projected to increase the US deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next decade. “Ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the nation.”
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), a longtime Trump ally who sponsored the legislation, blasted the president for vetoing “a completely non-controversial, bipartisan bill that passed both the House and Senate unanimously.”
Boebert also hinted that Trump’s reasons for passing the bill could be political retribution over her effort to force the release of files related to the criminal prosecution of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who for years was a friend of the president.
“I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability,” Boebert said. “Americans deserve leadership that puts people over politics.”
It’s not clear what Trump’s motives were for vetoing the bill, though he has been feuding with elected officials in Colorado over the continued imprisonment of Tina Peters, the former county clerk of Mesa County, Colorado who was convicted in 2024 of seven charges related to her allowing unlawful access to voting machines in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
Trump has demanded that Colorado release Peters, and he even went so far as to give her a presidential pardon, even though she was convicted on state charges rather than federal charges where such a pardon would carry real legal weight.
In a New Year’s Eve Truth Social post, Trump once again made false claims about Peters’ case.
“God Bless Tina Peters, who is now, for two years out of nine, sitting in a Colorado Maximum Security Prison, at the age of 73, and sick, for the ‘crime’ of trying to stop the massive voter fraud that goes on in her State,” Trump wrote.
In reality, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Colorado during the 2020 election.
Trump finished off his post by lashing out at Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, a Republican whose office successfully put Peters in prison for a nine-year sentence.
“To the Scumbag Governor, and the disgusting ‘Republican’ (RINO!) DA, who did this to her (nothing happens to the Dems and their phony Mail In Ballot System that makes it impossible for a Republican to win an otherwise very winnable State!), I wish them only the worst,” Trump wrote. “May they rot in Hell. FREE TINA PETERS!”
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Federal agents block people protesting an ICE immigration raid at a nearby licensed cannabis farm on July 10, 2025 near Camarillo, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The propaganda blitz will be aimed at “people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear,” according to the Washington Post.
The Trump administration is planning a massive propaganda campaign aimed at recruiting thousands of new federal immigration enforcement officers to carry out its mass deportation agenda.
The Washington Postreported on Wednesday that it had obtained internal documents revealing that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to spend $100 million over the next year on what the agency describes as a “wartime recruitment” drive.
The propaganda blitz will be targeted at highly specific demographics, including “people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear,” according to the Post.
The ICE drive would also use an ad-targeting technique called “geofencing” to send recruitment ads to users’ phone browsers if they are in the vicinity of certain locations, such as military bases, NASCAR races, college campuses, and gun shows.
The ads being designed for the recruitment drive will be based around current appeals that depict joining ICE as part of a “sacred duty” to “defend the homeland” from “foreign invaders,” the Post reported.
This rhetoric is similar to the language used in a recent ICE job post flagged by University of Wisconsin–Madison sociologist Jess Calarco. The listing asked prospective recruits if they are “ready to defend the homeland” by joining “an elite team dedicated to… securing our nation’s safety.”
Calarco noted that the job post “reads like a video game ad,” which she said “is almost certainly by design.”
Sarah Saldaña, a director of ICE under the Obama administration, told the Post that it is worrying to see the Trump administration casting such a wide net for people who lack any experience in law enforcement and who may be eager for what the Post described as “all-out combat.”
The recruitment blitz comes amid new indications that the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is falling far short of its goals.
The New Republic‘s Greg Sargent on Wednesday wrote that immigration arrests this year have fallen far short of the goal of 3,000 people per day set by top Trump aide Stephen Miller, and it seems highly unlikely that Miller will realize his dream of deporting 1 million people per year.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, told Sargent that “it’s clear that they have not achieved the shock-and-awe campaign of mass deportations that they wanted, and they are still running into quite a lot of obstacles.”
Reichlin-Melnick also predicted that “there will still be millions of people here who are undocumented” after Trump leaves office in 2028, as the administration “will not be able to deport even the majority of undocumented immigrants in four years.”
The Trump administration earlier in the year announced plans to entice new ICE recruits by offering them $50,000 sign-up bonuses and assistance with repaying student loans in a bid to double the agency’s head count.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer talks to soldiers during a visit to the Netherlands marines training base, June 24, 2025
Labour’s cynical recruitment drive normalises militarism, diverts attention from youth unemployment and public service cuts, and seeks to build consent for an increasingly aggressive defence agenda, argues GEORGINA ANDREWS
THE Labour government has announced that it will launch an armed forces “gap year” for under-25s. It will initially be open to 150 recruits, expanding to 1,000 in the future, with a starting salary of around £26,000.
It will include training in the Royal Navy, British Army and Royal Air Force for those looking for a career in the military.
Presented as an opportunity to young people, this scheme in reality is to manufacture consent for warfare and militarism among youth as more personnel leave the military rather than join it these days.
…
This military gap year scheme is cited as tackling youth unemployment which has reached a staggering 15.3 per cent, meaning 702,000 young people are not in education, employment or training, up 60,000 from last year.
Youth unemployment is intrinsically linked to cuts to public services, which are in crisis. Genuine job opportunities for youth are lacking, which might make this scheme tempting for some young people, and highlights the lack of genuine investment in youth and public services from successive governments. Young people demand jobs not bombs.
Young communists oppose this gap-year scheme, which promotes careers in the military to young people instead of genuinely investing in youth and public services to tackle unemployment. Young people should be part of building strong and organised labour, peace and progressive movements to demand peace, fully funded public services, and the implementation of the ADR in their workplaces, campuses and communities.
Vast military expenditure increases must end in favour of the demilitarised strategy on conflict, which promotes human security, co-operation and diplomacy, outlined by the ADR. Public services should be fully and adequately funded by an end to militarism and drive to war alongside other measures.
The Communist Party and its youth wing the Young Communist League offer youth an alternative to militarism and drive to war, through Britain’s Road to Socialism. Let us build the united front against war and austerity for peace, jobs and socialism in our lifetime.
Georgina Andrews is general secretary of the Young Communist League.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAGenocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer talks to soldiers during a visit to the Netherlands marines training base, June 24, 2025
